FIAC’s Cour Carrée “So Good It’s Scary”

Courtesy Perry Rubenstein Gallery

Faile's "Faile Wonderland" (2009) went to a French collector for $50,000 at Perry Rubenstein's booth.

Alexander Calder Josef Albers Susan Collis Barnaby Furnas Tushar Joag Jitish Kallat Chris Ofili Rashid Rana

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Major collectors were spotted at the 80-gallery-strong section’s VIP preview on Tuesday afternoon, including London’s Fatima Malaki, who bought the cover lot Chris Ofili painting at Sotheby’s London last week for £577,250 ($939,648).

Shireen Gandhy longtime director of Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road Gallery could barely contain her excitement as Malaki exited her booth.

“It’s fantastic,” said Gandhy, whose stand was devoted to photographs, “because we came here with a lot of apprehension, but we’ve done so well today, it’s back to the times when I sold big-ticket items to big collectors.”

Gandhy had already sold Rashid Rana’s Rothko-esque C print What Lies between Flesh & Blood 2 (2009), from an edition of five, for €55,000 ($82,500), and Jitish Kallat’s Cenotaph (A Deed of Transfer) (2007), comprised of 20 lenticular prints depicting a slum street in Mumbai “to a big French collector” for €22,500 ($33,800).

Gandhy also sold Vivan Sundaram’s Metal Box (2008), a large digital print on archival paper, for €8,000, and two 2009 digital prints by Tushar Joag, The Races and Yet Unbridled, for €9,000 apiece.

“I don’t even apply to Frieze,” says Gandhy, “because it’s very hard to do two fairs back to back — and besides, I sell mostly to French collectors.”

New York art adviser Thea Westreich, stopped in a corridor, also raved about the fair. “This is so good, it’s scary. There cannot be enough time to investigate how many artists are so appealing. The quality here is extraordinary.”

Sales were widespread. At London’s Bischoff/Weiss, an untitled sculpture by Matt Golden sold for €1,800 ($2,700), two drawings by Nathaniel Rackowe went for €2,000 apiece ($3,000), and four drawings by Maya Hewitt sold for €600 ($900) each. All are from 2009.

Another London stand, Herald Street, one of 14 that received a 50 percent subsidy for the fair from the Galerie Lafayette Group, had almost instant success, selling Donald Urquhart’s An Alphabet of Paris (Arletty to Zizi), a set of three drawings in ink on paper that pay homage to French artists, made especially for the Cour Carrée, to a European collector for £7,500 ($11,255).

Paris dealer Frank Elbaz sold three unique works by British sculptor Susan Collis, who was featured in the Frame section of the Frieze Art Fair last week by her London dealer Seventeen Gallery. Her work looks like found objects but are carefully fabricated using exotic materials. She Falls Down (2009), a reference to a Giacometti sculpture, is made of cedar, walnut, oak, American holly, white gold, yellow gold, silver, smoked topaz, granite, and aluminum, and sold for €3,500 ($5,250), as did Untitled, a trompe l’oeil version of screws cleverly mounted in the gallery stand wall, done in platinum, turquoise, and white sapphire.

“We sold four things in the first few hours, including a work to a trustee of the Pompidou,” said New York’s Perry Rubenstein. Among them was Robin Rhode’s latest work, Necklace, a series of 16 C prints in an edition of five featuring the artist skipping rope, which sold for $75,000. It’s based on a 2005 performance at the Museum of Modern Art.

The dealer also sold several works by the painting collaborative team Faile, including Faile Wonderland (2009), a 64-by-40-inch work in acrylic and silkscreen ink on wood and framed in steel, “to an important French collector” for $50,000, and a smaller work for $40,000.

Curiously, Cour Carrée had a more international flavor and representation than its big brother at the Grand Palais, at least a third of whose exhibitors are Paris-based, leading some to grumble that this year’s FIAC was too Frenchified.

All was not rosy over at the Palais, especially for the few dealers whose stands were obscured and made largely invisible by the big structure housing the 10 blue-chip dealers in the new Modern Project section.